Saturday, May 10, 2008

Continue reading.."Microsoft plans to offer PC makers steep discounts on Windows XP Home Edition to encourage them to use that OS instead of Linux on ultra low-cost PCs (ULPCs). To be eligible, however, the PC vendors that make ULPCs must limit screen sizes to 10.2 inches and hard drives to 80G bytes, and they cannot offer touch-screen PCs."

Microsoft will sell XP Home for $26 to $32, but only if the devises are "not too good" The price it self is really good news but the limits are not.

Limits:

CPU: Up to 1GHz single-core, Via C7-M up to 1.6GHz, Intel Atom N270 1.6GHzRAM: up to 1GBScreen: No bigger than 10.2 inch, No touchHDD: Up to 80GB

I could agree some of the limits... but no touch?? Does Microsoft really think it could eat Tablet PC sales? Or UMPC sales?

We don't want Vista on the small and mobile computers as it does not work on them!!

The worst thing is that this could actually effect on touchscreens overall..

It might make oem to not make touch at all as they may not want to make different devices for different OS...

So if a small MID has super cheap price and touch it can't have XP now?

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comments:

That is not wisely for this company, i don't know why they do this to themselves, whenever they are trying to do the one good thing they end up doing zeros. They might have got the big idea after all, it's all about ones and zeros...

This is quite an absurd limitation to try and enforce! Anyway, whats stopping us from adding our own custom touchscreens once we get the machine? I suppose it is a bit of a screw up for people that don't want to go and open up their PC, but for me it shouldn't be a problem.

Hey, let's all ready into it. They're not BANNING touchscreens on ULCPC's, if you want a ULCPC with a touchscreen, it's just going to cost you more because you're not gonna get XP Home bundled for a cheap rate.

Yes sadly this will impacts the larger companies projected sales calculations and shift the cost/revenue equilibrium for ULPC XP a fair bit. Maybe even so far that actually developing and manufacturing ULPC Linux will be too costly and scrapped altogether... This bit of news completely ruined my day yesterday. I love Linux and I love touchscreens on ULPC´s. What happened with Microsoft dropping all support for XP?

Microsoft is so desperate to kill XP that they fail to understand that people simply do not want Vista. They are hurting themselves by establishing these restrictions. For many consumers, it's either XP or Linux. Vista is hardly an option.

This is the one laptop market where Linux is an available option on all models, and it's either cheaper, or in the case of the 900, a much better equipped system. Microsoft has to see this!

By striking the discount on all future sub-notebooks (Atom @ <1GHz will likely not be as powerful as 900MHz Dothan) most consumers (who go with sub-notebooks because they are cheap) will refuse to pay the price premium for a system equipped with un-discounted XP, and will certainly not pay for bloated Vista.

Linux sub-notebooks are a much better deal. I really hope the manufacturers exploit the customizability and freeness of Linux, and produce models equipped with a very streamlined and feature rich distro. Just slapping any distro on a sub-notebook is not good enough (HP learned this with the MiniNote).

Now is the time and this is the market for Linux to really shine in a new, dark, and unexplored area.

I suppose the MS position makes sense, in that it helps to define different classes of machine - smartphones, MIDs, ULCPCs, subnotes etc. in terms of the features they do and do not have.

Look at what happened to auto manufacturers when such distinctions get blurry - everything becomes a "crossover", with needless filling and missing necessities.

The problem is that MS seems to be ignoring that I *really* want to buy something about the size of an eee 900, about the price of an eee 900, about the weight of an eee 900, running XP like an eee 900, but with a convertible form factor.

When this class of machine was first being touted, we were told that a primary target was the education sector. Leaving aside entirely the K-12 stage, the ULCPC segment is ideal for third level students. Cheap, light, simple, reliable, pretty, and easy to use like a notepad and pen, in a 'wallpaper' sort of way.

To hell with the *intended* breakdown of this segment in terms of form factor and features, the *actual* market will be dividing these machines up in terms of price points as much as feature sets. The proof of that is Sony's oh-so-long history of making small, light, pretty, practical but ludicrously expensive machines of similar type.

If Asus can squeeze in a TS without adding a zero to the price tag or ditching the eee's USPs [which include its price] then let them. Otherwise, Apple will step in and we'll have lovely OSX installs to go with the shiny white plastic.

MS tried to take the lead in boundary-pushing portables before, and failed miserably to make them catch on. For such a successful company to fail miserably to learn from mistakes is very very odd.